hillary & ww4

Last week at the DNC, both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama delivered lengthy speeches filled with platitudes and bromides, but they did not bother to mention one extremely important piece of information. They did not tell the Pindosi sheeple that even as he spoke, Obama had just ordered the Pentagon to carry out a major new act of war. With the air strikes launched against the Libyan coastal city of Sirte on Monday, Pindo imperialism has embarked on a major new escalation of its protracted military intervention in a region that has seen the killing and maiming of millions in unending invasions, bombings, targeted assassinations and regime-change operations over the course of a quarter-century. The Obama administration ordered the strikes without congressional authorization or bothering even to make a pretense of explaining the rationale for this latest act of war to the Pindosi sheeple. A Pentagon spox asked about the legality of the bombings cited the 2001 AUMF, which sanctioned military action against those who planned and executed the 9/11 attacks and those who supported them. Fifteen years later, the argument that this applies to anyone killed by Pindosi bombs in Libya is absurd on its face.

Ostensibly, the bombing raids are aimed at aiding a group of militias aligned with the Western-backed “Government of National Accord” to prevail against Da’esh, which has controlled Sirte since February of last year. In reality, the desperate conditions in Sirte and throughout Libya are the direct product of the 2011 Pindo-NATO war for regime-change, in which Faschingstein and its allies relied upon Islamist AQ-linked militias that were subsequently funnelled, along with massive stockpiles of Libyan arms, into Syria to carry out an even bloodier, and ongoing, regime-change operation in that country. Those who took over Sirte, the hometown of Gaddafi and the city most devastated by the war, consisted of these former Pindo proxy forces who returned from the Syrian killing fields. The dropping of more Pindosi bombs on Libya, whose economy and society have been destroyed by the Pindo-NATO intervention, will hardly resolve the country’s crisis. That is not their purpose. Rather, this fresh eruption of Pindo militarism is meant to serve as another assertion of US hegemony in the region. It is also a pointed threat to Washington’s adversaries under conditions where the debacles produced by the CIA-orchestrated war for regime-change in Syria and the failed Pindo-backed coup in Turkey have raised tensions between Pindostan and Russia to the boiling point.

WSWS has warned for some time that the current US election will be followed in short order, no matter which capitalist party prevails, by a new eruption of Pindo militarism. Traditionally, the Pindosi ruling establishment has held off on major new military interventions until after elections, so as to prevent the question of war from becoming an issue before the voters. The bombing of Libya, however, makes clear that they cannot wait, so sharp is the crisis confronting Pindo imperialism. One thing is certain, the attack on Libya was not planned yesterday. High-ranking boxtops who spoke before the DNC in Philadelphia last week, including Biden, Obama and Clinton, must have been well aware that a new military intervention was imminent. The bombs dropped on Libya make clear the significance of the convention’s non-stop glorification of the military and the fascistic chants of “Pindostan! Pindostan!” used to drown out even the muted and scattered expressions of opposition to war. New and far more dangerous wars are being prepared and will not be postponed. On the final day of the convention, a top Clinton foreign policy advisor and former chief of staff at both the Pentagon and the CIA, Jeremy Bash, told the British Daily Telegraph:

A Syria policy review will be one of the first items of business for the national security team.

He described the Syrian government of Assad as a “murderous regime” and vowed that the new administration would get him “out of there.” According to the report, he described “a foreign policy more hawkish than that of the current administration.” The current administration is already carrying out daily bombing raids in Syria that over recent days have killed hundreds of civilians. It has deployed hundreds of SOF on the ground in support of Pindosi proxy forces. It has proven incapable, however, of propping up the so-called “rebels,” consisting of Jabhat al-Nusra and other Islamist militias, against a Russian-backed offensive by Syrian government forces. Under these conditions, a “more hawkish” policy can mean only one thing: a direct military intervention against the Assad regime and a confrontation with the Russian and Iranian forces that are supporting it. Once again, the meaning of the convention rhetoric is revealed. The McCarthyite rhetoric against Russia in connection with unsubstantiated claims that Putin was behind the WikiLeaks release of DNC emails, was aimed at preparing public opinion for a military confrontation between the world’s two largest nuclear powers. It is far from clear that such a confrontation can be held off until a new administration takes office, or even until the November election. The imminent collapse of the “rebel” stronghold in the Syrian city of Aleppo and the move toward rapprochement between Turkey and Russia are driving Faschingstein toward new military actions. It may not be able to wait to carry out the military escalation for which the Democratic convention set the stage. The world situation is on a hair trigger. Outside of the intervention of the working class, a third world war is not only a threat, but an inevitability.